The current system employed in telephone circuitry, employing the "old type" main distributing frame, entails multitudinous cross-wiring and splicing, requires the use of large and heavy structures which take up an enormous amount of building space, and because of the complexity of the wiring and the density resulting from the packing of thousands of pairs of wires on the horizontal shelves of said frame, makes the tracing, addition to, and replacement of cross-wiring extremely difficult, very expensive and time-consuming.
The "new" No. 1 ESS frame and its later so-called "cosmic" frame replacement actually create more problems than they solve, i.e.; (A) while the size and weight of the "old" frame is circumvented to some extent, the complete flexibility of the "old" frame is totally lost since, perphaps 95 percent of the wires to be connected are segregated into 6000 connection modules with very small cross-wiring gutters provided at the top and bottom of each module for use in connecting module-to-module. Because these "gutters" are so small, the amount of module-to-module cross-wiring is extremely limited. For these reasons, the complete ultimate number of modules have to be installed initially. Because this design is so poor, the ultimate building also has to be built initially to house the modules. This design, therefore, requires wire counts of each cable entering the building to be spread across all the modules. All of these horrendously costly procedures arise from the fact that there is substantially no cross-wiring flexibility in the system design. Finally, the ESS frame cannot handle multi-wire circuits such as video, carrier, and long-distance wire circuitry, ergo, a separate "old type" frame is a must to meet these needs.
The multi-terminal connector structure of this invention is designed to eliminate the lost time, high cost of operation and maintenance inherent in the prior systems, in particular, in the field of telephone circuitry, it being understood, however, that it has wider application than this, for example, in the computer and power fields.